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Bloodshot (Acclaim Comics)
| Alignment = | Gender = | Birthplace = | Status = | Occupation = | Family = | Affiliations = Domestic Operations Authority (formerly) | Creators = Kevin VanHook (original) Yvel Guichet (original) (reboot) (reboot) | First = Original: ( ) Reboot: ( ) | Last = }} Bloodshot is a living weapon created by the Domestic Operations Authority. He was revived from death using special nanites in his bloodstream that give him a variety of superhuman powers. History Angelo Mortalli was a cover identity assumed by Raymond Garrison, an agent of the Domestic Operations Authority, for the purpose of infiltrating the Cianelli crime family. Unforeseen circumstances resulted in Angelo’s exposure and execution. Fortunately, the DOA was able to recover his remains promptly enough to place them in cryogenic suspension and preserve them while Project: Lazarus perfected the process of nanotechnological resurrection. Severe mnemonic fragmentation due to tissue necrosis, however, complicated the reconstruction of consciousness. The nanites employed the clearest, most recent memories – those of the Mortalli identity – as their template, and in so doing, transformed fiction into delusion. The Angel of Death He strikes like a bolt of lightning. Bones and sinew are ground into powder in his hands. Microscopic machines whisper into his brain and haunt him with memories of an erased past. Once he was Raymond Garrison. Now he is Bloodshot… and he is the walking dead! Trapped in a labyrinth of conspiracy, Raymond will not skulk in the shadows fingering his way through filling cabinets! He has big guns, searing reflexes, and the indomitable will to learn why the mob has taken his life – and the United States government has stolen his soul. What he will discover is so terrible that it will affect every man, woman, and child on Earth. The Horseman As four mobsters came out of a theater in Bensonhurst one evening, Raymond Garrison opened fire on them and a shootout ensued. Though the men shot him at least seven times, Raymond did not notice, and, in a voice that sounded like if a gravestone could talk, he asked one of them about Angelo Mortalli and he told him to ask Michael Pileggi just before a car ran him over. As Raymond pursued the car through the Belt Parkway on a stolen Harley, a man in the car shot him on the chest with a shotgun, but the hit did not faze him and he shot him back on the throat while he smiled. The last shotgun blast blew out Raymond’s front tire and he went through the guardrail into Sheepshead Bay. While Raymond, who was gravely injured, hid in the bottom of the bay, he paid heed to the voices in his head that told him to sleep, and, in his slumber, he relived his rebirth at the hands of Dr. Frederick J. Stroheim, the DOA scientist in charge of Project Lazarus. In his dream, Raymond awoke in a regeneration tank and grabbed Cameron Sinclair, an agent of the Domestic Operations Authority and his friend, who when he demanded that he tell him where he was, who the people around him where, and what they had done to him, said that they brought him back from the dead. While the DOA kept him isolated, Raymond itemized the information he possessed to find an explanation for what occurred to him, and once he went over the process that brought him back to life six months after he was murdered, he came to the conclusion that he was not who they had told him and escaped. When the divers found him, Raymond dispatched them and then slipped past a DOA dragnet that was looking for him. After he gathered the supplies that he required to aid the nanites in his blood to heal him, Raymond holed up in a hotel on 86th Street, and, once he tended to his wounds, he called Pileggi and asked him about Angelo Mortalli, but he claimed that he did not know the name and hung up on him. When Raymond called again and Pileggi told him that he had never heard of Angelo Mortalli, he told him that he would. The Walking Dead After Raymond Garrison broke into Michael Pileggi’s penthouse apartment and killed all his men, he dragged Michael Pileggi to the cemetery and forced him to dig out Angelo Mortalli’s grave to open the casket. When Pileggi opened the casket and revealed that it was filled with cinder blocks, Raymond grabbed him by the throat and said that he would loosen his grip only long enough for him to take exactly one breath and use it to tell him something he did not know, and, that as long as he kept talking, he would breathe. Michael told Raymond that Mortalli was a made man in the Cianelli crime family and that Don Cianelli ordered his murder after he cooperated with the FBI. When Michael confessed that he did not know what happened to the body, and that he only handled the funeral because the Don’s daughter loved Angelo and they wanted to keep up appearances, Raymond tossed him in the casket and buried him. While Raymond walked down a dark street, he recalled the moments that followed his escape from the DOA. Raymond recalled how, after he dispatched the guards that were watching him and hacked into L.I.Z.A., the DOA’s artificial intelligence computer, he escaped through an air shaft that took him to the armory where he acquired his equipment, and then stole a helicopter. When Raymond remembered how after a DOA helicopter fired a missile he leapt into the river to escape, he wonder is what Project Lazarus called from the grave was not enough to make a whole man, or if he brought back too much of Death with him. Just then, Raymond walked by an empty lot where his house used to be, and, although he remembered the building, every brick, and every board, he could not remember ever living there. When Raymond asked a neighbor about Gina DeCarlo, Don Cianelli’s daughter, she told him that she had never heard of her and warned him to leave before she called the police. While Raymond searched for Angelo Mortalli in a diner’s directory and discovered that it did not exist, he recalled a time when he ate there with friends who he figured were gone just like Gina. The Disassembled Man As Raymond Garrison walked to a building door intent on going inside, he suddenly smelled the scent of copper wiring and fuel aerogel and walked away. A fraction of a second later, the building exploded and the members of the Chainsaw, a team of highly-trained mercenaries that worked for the Domestic Operations Authority, opened fire on him with incendiary rounds. After he took a direct hit to the chest that sent him reeling into an alley and severely injured him, Raymond patched his injuries with bailing wire and a stray cat that the nanites could use to regenerate his injuries. As he compared himself and Chainsaw to the tale of the blind men and the elephant, Raymond concluded that once he took out one of them their structure would collapse and used an explosive they wired to a building to kill their heavy ordinance expert. Raymond then tracked the rest of Chainsaw and killed them one at a time. As dawn broke, Gina DeCarlo appeared to Raymond in the form of an apparition and warned him of a man of light whose soul was cold and dark, and told him that a pale rider who carried the candle of truth within the darkest of hearts would lead the four horsemen that would arise to ride against the blinding light. Before she vanished, Gina told Raymond that, before she died, they tried to brainwash her so she would not remember him, but that just like after their first date every time the words ‘’Reservoir Dogs’’ made her hot for him, there were some things she could not forget. The mention of ‘’Reservoir Dogs’’ made Raymond remember everything, but left with a few missing pieces, he knew that he had to go back to where they revived him to meet his maker in order to find them. Prometheus Unbound When Raymond Garrison returned to Project Lazarus and demanded that Stroheim tell him the truth of what happened to him, Stroheim told him that truth was an existential construct with no reliable means of objective analysis, and that he preferred to concern himself with facts. Offended by Raymond’s entrance and demands, Stroheim told that they were an extremely ill-mannered way to address the man who gave him life, to which Raymond retorted that he was only his creator on the outside. Though Stroheim refused to explain himself and rhetorically asked him what possible answers could the creation rightfully demand from the creator, Raymond, who was desperate for an answer, asked him what he was and why he created him. As Stroheim forced Raymond to gaze into a tank of water, he said that from the first primitive replicators swam in preblotic fluid and built to the critical mass of the Cambrian explosion through repeated extinctions, the purpose of life was to live, and that it existed because it could just as he made him because he could. While Stroheim showed Raymond the regeneration tank, he told him that the emergent possibilities of technological confluence had made him inevitable, and explained how, once the conditions of survival had been carefully supervised and manipulated, he achieved direct evolution of a vastly accelerated schedule by compressing billions of years of natural selection into less than a decade. Stroheim told Raymond how from molecular engineering he took the means to shape crude mechanisms built from handfuls of atoms, how genetic algorithms from simulated cellular automata of artificial life provided the kernels on which to base their operating systems, and how biology established the instructions necessary to imperfectly replicate life to allow for the rare error that conferred advantage. After Stroheim told Raymond that he created neo-biological organisms beyond the hand of man to design that served his whims, even revive the dead, Raymond said that tiny robots were just robots and not being dead was not the same as being alive. When Stroheim retorted that any sufficiently advanced nanotechnology was indistinguishable from life, Raymond accused him of thinking that he was indistinguishable from God, and then grabbed him by the collar and told him to look down at his work and tell him if he found it was good. Enraged, Raymond tossed Stroheim against a vat of fluid and said that if he was God then he was an atheist. As a nanological solution filled the laboratory, the contamination hazard protocols sealed the affected area and activated a thermal sterilization that would incinerate the room. When Stroheim tried to reach the keypad and enter the countermand code before they died, Raymond held him back and told him that he still owed him. When Stroheim told Raymond that he made him what he was and gave him life, Raymond retorted that he did not ask for it and told him that if he wanted to live he had to give him a reason. While Raymond held him by the collar, Stroheim told him that he was responsible for developing the process that brought him to life, but that he did not know what they were going to use him for because they did not brief on matters of strategic deployment since he did not need to know. Angered with the realization that he was nothing more than a weapon made of meat, Raymond tossed Stroheim aside, and, while he destroyed the laboratory, he demanded that Stroheim tell him how many others there were in his inventory of living dead. As Stroheim said that he needed the prime assembler that he hosted to create others like him, Raymond shattered his hand and stopped him from reaching the keypad to annul the thermal sterilization. While Raymond welcomed the end, Simon Oreck, the head of the DOA, halted the process offered to provide him with what he sought if he dared risk finding it. When Raymond asked him who he was, Oreck told him that a mutual friend of their, Michael Pileggi, would call him the brains of the operation. Since he was finished with Stroheim, Raymond left him in the rubble of his laboratory and followed an illuminated path to where Oreck promised he would find the poison pill of truth on a silver plate. Codename: Bloodshot As Raymond Garrison followed the light into corridors thick with the breath of sterility, passed security guards that let him thru, he mused that, while they could scour away the rot and filter out the stench of decay, it did not change that buried the truth alive there. When Raymond entered the Think Tank, Oreck offered him a change of attire to replace his clothes, which tattered during Chainsaw's attack. While Raymond changed, Oreck told him his name and that he was the guest of the Domestic Operations Authority, a cover operations arm of the United States government, when, suddenly, Raymond pulled out a gun and ordered Simon to shut up. While he held a gun to Oreck’s head, Raymond told him that long as he answered his questions he would not shoot, but then Oreck activated the chamber’s environment controls and caused the floor beneath his feet to vanish and Raymond plummeted down a shaft. As Raymond fell through what he discerned were nothing more than holograms and illusions, he grabbed a ledge and pulled himself up. While Raymond stood in the middle of a platform surrounded by monitors that displayed his face, Oreck told him that his questions were classic conundrums of identity and epistemology, and asked him what was reality and how one knew to distinguish the real from errors of perception, more specifically Angelo Mortalli, a name occluded behind codename Bloodshot. When Oreck mockingly said that Angelo Mortalli was nothing more than a minor footnote in the history of organized crime, a victim of a greater conspiracy, or a man shorn of existence erased from the official records for reasons most sinister, Raymond demanded that he tell him the truth and a hologram of Angelo Mortalli appeared before him. When Angelo asked him if he knew him, Raymond told Angelo that he died before he was born and then the platform vanished and he fell once again. As Oreck loomed over Raymond in the form of a hologram, he told him that Angelo Mortalli was not dead for the simple reason that he never existed. After Oreck revealed that Raymond Garrison, a DOA operative, assumed the identity of Angelo Mortalli to infiltrate the Cianelli crime family, and then, through unforeseen circumstances, was executed and subsequently brought back to life through means that transformed fiction into reality, to his surprise, Raymond told him that he already knew all of that. Enraged, Oreck shattered a monitor while Raymond told him that he thought that he held a secret hammer with the power to break his spirit like a sheet of glass and then he could use the pieces to build the good little robot he meant him to be, to crush his soul and enslave the leftovers. Mocking Oreck, Raymond said that while he built tombs for secrets, he never realized that he shut himself away from the light and become so bloated from swallowing his lies that he did not know what reality smelled like anymore, otherwise he would have known that he could not shatter a vacuum and could not use truth to build chains. As the lights in the holotank came on, Oreck told Raymond through a PA system that his words were poetic but utterly irrelevant, as physical coercion was unnecessary when he possessed the means to manipulate his perceptions, a concept that he suspected he had no difficulty understanding. After Oreck revealed that the distance between them crossed no less than three state lines, he told Raymond that he was of no use to him at his present stage of mental development, and that the outside world would be an effective instructor. While Raymond stepped out of the room, Oreck told him that when he was prepared to accept his guidance he would return of his own accord, but Raymond turned back and told him to hold his breath. As Raymond made his way across a darken bridge, he mused that the grail brimmed with ashes of futility, bitter salvation, shattered chains of identity, and freedom found in the embrace of meaninglessness, and as he pondered that the purpose of his existence was his to define, he set out to learn who Raymond Garrison was. Personality Powers and Abilities Equipment * Collapsible M–23 Multitasker ** Features include Cartridge swap–out choice of rounds and Nightvision scope with recoil–dampening internal architecture * Micromesh icepick stoppers * Flexon jumpsuit * Utility harness * Fractal soled traction boots * Tailored bulge–proof trench * Semi-Automatic .666 Mag, with laser-targeting and active sound suppression Notes Appearances Gallery File:Bloodshot Bloodshot-v2-1 001.jpg File:Bloodshot Bloodshot-v2-2 001.jpg File:Bloodshot Bloodshot-v2-2 002.jpg File:Bloodshot Bloodshot-v2-2 003.jpg Quotes References External links Category:Bloodshot Category:Firearms Category:Empowered by Nanites